OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Spiking Central Pattern Generator for the control of a simulated lamprey robot running on SpiNNaker and Loihi neuromorphic boards
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) models have been long used to investigate both the neural mechanisms that underlie animal locomotion as well as a tool for robotic research. In this work we propose a spiking CPG neural network and its implementation on neuromorphic hardware as a means to control a simulated lamprey model. To construct our CPG model, we employ the naturally emerging dynamical systems that arise through the use of recurrent neural populations in the Neural Engineering Framework (NEF). We define the mathematical formulation behind our model, which consists of a system of coupled abstract oscillators modulated by high-level signals, capable of producing a variety of output gaits. We show that with this mathematical formulation of the Central Pattern Generator model, the model can be turned into a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) that can be easily simulated with Nengo, an SNN simulator. The spiking CPG model is then used to produce the swimming gaits of a simulated lamprey robot model in various scenarios. We show that by modifying the input to the network, which can be provided by sensory information, the robot can be controlled dynamically in direction and pace. The proposed methodology can be generalized to other types of CPGs suitable for both engineering applications and scientific research. We test our system on two neuromorphic platforms, SpiNNaker and Loihi. Finally, we show that this category of spiking algorithms shows a promising potential to exploit the theoretical advantages of neuromorphic hardware in terms of energy efficiency and computational speed.
Separating Polarization from Noise: Comparison and Normalization of Structural Polarization Measures
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Quantifying the amount of polarization is crucial for understanding and studying political polarization in political and social systems. Several methods are used commonly to measure polarization in social networks by purely inspecting their structure. We analyse eight of such methods and show that all of them yield high polarization scores even for random networks with similar density and degree distributions to typical real-world networks. Further, some of the methods are sensitive to degree distributions and relative sizes of the polarized groups. We propose normalization to the existing scores and a minimal set of tests that a score should pass in order for it to be suitable for separating polarized networks from random noise. The performance of the scores increased by 38%-220% after normalization in a classification task of 203 networks. Further, we find that the choice of method is not as important as normalization, after which most of the methods have better performance than the best-performing method before normalization. This work opens up the possibility to critically assess and compare the features and performance of different methods for measuring structural polarization.
Deep Universal Blind Image Denoising
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Image denoising is an essential part of many image processing and computer vision tasks due to inevitable noise corruption during image acquisition. Traditionally, many researchers have investigated image priors for the denoising, within the Bayesian perspective based on image properties and statistics. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great success in image denoising by incorporating large-scale synthetic datasets. However, they both have pros and cons. While the deep CNNs are powerful for removing the noise with known statistics, they tend to lack flexibility and practicality for the blind and real-world noise. Moreover, they cannot easily employ explicit priors. On the other hand, traditional non-learning methods can involve explicit image priors, but they require considerable computation time and cannot exploit large-scale external datasets. In this paper, we present a CNN-based method that leverages the advantages of both methods based on the Bayesian perspective. Concretely, we divide the blind image denoising problem into sub-problems and conquer each inference problem separately. As the CNN is a powerful tool for inference, our method is rooted in CNNs and propose a novel design of network for efficient inference. With our proposed method, we can successfully remove blind and real-world noise, with a moderate number of parameters of universal CNN.
Analysis of key flavors of event-driven predictive maintenance using logs of phenomena described by Weibull distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This work explores two approaches to event-driven predictive maintenance in Industry 4.0 that cast the problem at hand as a classification or a regression one, respectively, using as a starting point two state-of-the-art solutions. For each of the two approaches, we examine different data preprocessing techniques, different prediction algorithms and the impact of ensemble and sampling methods. Through systematic experiments regarding the aspectsmentioned above,we aimto understand the strengths of the alternatives, and more importantly, shed light on how to navigate through the vast number of such alternatives in an informed manner. Our work constitutes a key step towards understanding the true potential of this type of data-driven predictive maintenance as of to date, and assist practitioners in focusing on the aspects that have the greatest impact.
Online detection of failures generated by storage simulator
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Modern large-scale data-farms consist of hundreds of thousands of storage devices that span distributed infrastructure. Devices used in modern data centers (such as controllers, links, SSD- and HDD-disks) can fail due to hardware as well as software problems. Such failures or anomalies can be detected by monitoring the activity of components using machine learning techniques. In order to use these techniques, researchers need plenty of historical data of devices in normal and failure mode for training algorithms. In this work, we challenge two problems: 1) lack of storage data in the methods above by creating a simulator and 2) applying existing online algorithms that can faster detect a failure occurred in one of the components. We created a Go-based (golang) package for simulating the behavior of modern storage infrastructure. The software is based on the discrete-event modeling paradigm and captures the structure and dynamics of high-level storage system building blocks. The package's flexible structure allows us to create a model of a real-world storage system with a configurable number of components. The primary area of interest is exploring the storage machine's behavior under stress testing or exploitation in the medium- or long-term for observing failures of its components. To discover failures in the time series distribution generated by the simulator, we modified a change point detection algorithm that works in online mode. The goal of the change-point detection is to discover differences in time series distribution. This work describes an approach for failure detection in time series data based on direct density ratio estimation via binary classifiers.
Fundamental Limits of Demand-Private Coded Caching
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the coded caching problem with an additional privacy constraint that a user should not get any information about the demands of the other users. We first show that a demand-private scheme for $N$ files and $K$ users can be obtained from a non-private scheme that serves only a subset of the demands for the $N$ files and $NK$ users problem. We further use this fact to construct a demand-private scheme for $N$ files and $K$ users from a particular known non-private scheme for $N$ files and $NK-K+1$ users. It is then demonstrated that, the memory-rate pair $(M,\min \{N,K\}(1-M/N))$, which is achievable for non-private schemes with uncoded transmissions, is also achievable under demand privacy. We further propose a scheme that improves on these ideas by removing some redundant transmissions. The memory-rate trade-off achieved using our schemes is shown to be within a multiplicative factor of 3 from the optimal when $K < N$ and of 8 when $N\leq K$. Finally, we give the exact memory-rate trade-off for demand-private coded caching problems with $N\geq K=2$.
Verifiable Failure Localization in Smart Grid under Cyber-Physical Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2021
Year: 2021

Cyber-physical attacks impose a significant threat to the smart grid, as the cyber attack makes it difficult to identify the actual damage caused by the physical attack. To defend against such attacks, various inference-based solutions have been proposed to estimate the states of grid elements (e.g., transmission lines) from measurements outside the attacked area, out of which a few have provided theoretical conditions for guaranteed accuracy. However, these conditions are usually based on the ground truth states and thus not verifiable in practice. To solve this problem, we develop (i) verifiable conditions that can be tested based on only observable information, and (ii) efficient algorithms for verifying the states of links (i.e., transmission lines) within the attacked area based on these conditions. Our numerical evaluations based on the Polish power grid and IEEE 300-bus system demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are highly successful in verifying the states of truly failed links, and can thus greatly help in prioritizing repairs during the recovery process.
Maximizing approximately k-submodular functions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

We introduce the problem of maximizing approximately $k$-submodular functions subject to size constraints. In this problem, one seeks to select $k$-disjoint subsets of a ground set with bounded total size or individual sizes, and maximum utility, given by a function that is "close" to being $k$-submodular. The problem finds applications in tasks such as sensor placement, where one wishes to install $k$ types of sensors whose measurements are noisy, and influence maximization, where one seeks to advertise $k$ topics to users of a social network whose level of influence is uncertain. To deal with the problem, we first provide two natural definitions for approximately $k$-submodular functions and establish a hierarchical relationship between them. Next, we show that simple greedy algorithms offer approximation guarantees for different types of size constraints. Last, we demonstrate experimentally that the greedy algorithms are effective in sensor placement and influence maximization problems.
Energy-Efficient RIS-Assisted Satellites for IoT Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

The use of satellites to provide ubiquitous coverage and connectivity for densely deployed Internet of Things (IoT) networks is expected to be a reality in emerging 6G networks. Yet the low battery capacity of IoT nodes constitutes a problem for their direct connectivity to satellites, which are located at altitudes of up to 2000 km. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture involving the use of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) units to mitigate the path loss associated with long transmission distances. These RIS units can be placed on satellite reflectarrays, and, when used in broadcasting and beamforming, they can provide significant gains in signal transmission. This study shows that RIS-assisted satellites can provide up to 10^5 times higher downlink and achievable uplink rates for IoT networks.
HarDNet-MSEG: A Simple Encoder-Decoder Polyp Segmentation Neural Network that Achieves over 0.9 Mean Dice and 86 FPS
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a new convolution neural network called HarDNet-MSEG for polyp segmentation. It achieves SOTA in both accuracy and inference speed on five popular datasets. For Kvasir-SEG, HarDNet-MSEG delivers 0.904 mean Dice running at 86.7 FPS on a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU. It consists of a backbone and a decoder. The backbone is a low memory traffic CNN called HarDNet68, which has been successfully applied to various CV tasks including image classification, object detection, multi-object tracking and semantic segmentation, etc. The decoder part is inspired by the Cascaded Partial Decoder, known for fast and accurate salient object detection. We have evaluated HarDNet-MSEG using those five popular datasets. The code and all experiment details are available at Github. https://github.com/james128333/HarDNet-MSEG
Is it a great Autonomous FX Trading Strategy or you are just fooling yourself
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose a method for evaluating autonomous trading strategies that provides realistic expectations, regarding the strategy's long-term performance. This method addresses This method addresses many pitfalls that currently fool even experienced software developers and researchers, not to mention the customers that purchase these products. We present the results of applying our method to several famous autonomous trading strategies, which are used to manage a diverse selection of financial assets. The results show that many of these published strategies are far from being reliable vehicles for financial investment. Our method exposes the difficulties involved in building a reliable, long-term strategy and provides a means to compare potential strategies and select the most promising one by establishing minimal periods and requirements for the test executions. There are many developers that create software to buy and sell financial assets autonomously and some of them present great performance when simulating with historical price series (commonly called backtests). Nevertheless, when these strategies are used in real markets (or data not used in their training or evaluation), quite often they perform very poorly. The proposed method can be used to evaluate potential strategies. In this way, the method helps to tell if you really have a great trading strategy or you are just fooling yourself.
Buying Data Over Time: Approximately Optimal Strategies for Dynamic Data-Driven Decisions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

We consider a model where an agent has a repeated decision to make and wishes to maximize their total payoff. Payoffs are influenced by an action taken by the agent, but also an unknown state of the world that evolves over time. Before choosing an action each round, the agent can purchase noisy samples about the state of the world. The agent has a budget to spend on these samples, and has flexibility in deciding how to spread that budget across rounds. We investigate the problem of choosing a sampling algorithm that optimizes total expected payoff. For example: is it better to buy samples steadily over time, or to buy samples in batches? We solve for the optimal policy, and show that it is a natural instantiation of the latter. Under a more general model that includes per-round fixed costs, we prove that a variation on this batching policy is a 2-approximation.
Coverage Evaluation for 5G Reduced Capability New Radio (NR-RedCap)
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

The fifth generation (5G) wireless technology is primarily designed to address a wide range of use cases categorized into the enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable and low latency communication (URLLC), and massive machine-type communication (mMTC). Nevertheless, there are a few other use cases which are in-between these main use cases such as industrial wireless sensor networks, video surveillance, or wearables. In order to efficiently serve such use cases, in Release 17, the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) introduced the reduced capability NR devices (NR-RedCap) with lower cost and complexity, smaller form factor and longer battery life compared to regular NR devices. However, one key potential consequence of device cost and complexity reduction is the coverage loss. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of NR RedCap coverage for different physical channels and initial access messages to identify the channels/messages that are potentially coverage limiting for RedCap UEs. We perform the coverage evaluations for RedCap UEs operating in three different scenarios, namely Rural, Urban and Indoor with carrier frequencies 700 MHz, 2.6 GHz and 28 GHz, respectively. Our results confirm that for all the considered scenarios, the amounts of required coverage recovery for RedCap channels are either less than 1 dB or can be compensated by considering smaller data rate targets for RedCap use cases.
Improving Makeup Face Verification by Exploring Part-Based Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, we have seen an increase in the global facial recognition market size. Despite significant advances in face recognition technology with the adoption of convolutional neural networks, there are still open challenges, such as when there is makeup in the face. To address this challenge, we propose and evaluate the adoption of facial parts to fuse with current holistic representations. We propose two strategies of facial parts: one with four regions (left periocular, right periocular, nose and mouth) and another with three facial thirds (upper, middle and lower). Experimental results obtained in four public makeup face datasets and in a challenging cross-dataset protocol show that the fusion of deep features extracted of facial parts with holistic representation increases the accuracy of face verification systems and decreases the error rates, even without any retraining of the CNN models. Our proposed pipeline achieved competitive results for the four datasets (EMFD, FAM, M501 and YMU).
Automatic punctuation restoration with BERT models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We present an approach for automatic punctuation restoration with BERT models for English and Hungarian. For English, we conduct our experiments on Ted Talks, a commonly used benchmark for punctuation restoration, while for Hungarian we evaluate our models on the Szeged Treebank dataset. Our best models achieve a macro-averaged $F_1$-score of 79.8 in English and 82.2 in Hungarian. Our code is publicly available.
Object Detection and Pose Estimation from RGB and Depth Data for Real-time, Adaptive Robotic Grasping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In recent times, object detection and pose estimation have gained significant attention in the context of robotic vision applications. Both the identification of objects of interest as well as the estimation of their pose remain important capabilities in order for robots to provide effective assistance for numerous robotic applications ranging from household tasks to industrial manipulation. This problem is particularly challenging because of the heterogeneity of objects having different and potentially complex shapes, and the difficulties arising due to background clutter and partial occlusions between objects. As the main contribution of this work, we propose a system that performs real-time object detection and pose estimation, for the purpose of dynamic robot grasping. The robot has been pre-trained to perform a small set of canonical grasps from a few fixed poses for each object. When presented with an unknown object in an arbitrary pose, the proposed approach allows the robot to detect the object identity and its actual pose, and then adapt a canonical grasp in order to be used with the new pose. For training, the system defines a canonical grasp by capturing the relative pose of an object with respect to the gripper attached to the robot's wrist. During testing, once a new pose is detected, a canonical grasp for the object is identified and then dynamically adapted by adjusting the robot arm's joint angles, so that the gripper can grasp the object in its new pose. We conducted experiments using a humanoid PR2 robot and showed that the proposed framework can detect well-textured objects, and provide accurate pose estimation in the presence of tolerable amounts of out-of-plane rotation. The performance is also illustrated by the robot successfully grasping objects from a wide range of arbitrary poses.
Panel: Humans and Technology for Inclusive Privacy and Security
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Computer security and user privacy are critical issues and concerns in the digital era due to both increasing users and threats to their data. Separate issues arise between generic cybersecurity guidance (i.e., protect all user data from malicious threats) and the individualistic approach of privacy (i.e., specific to users and dependent on user needs and risk perceptions). Research has shown that several security- and privacy-focused vulnerabilities are technological (e.g., software bugs (Streiff, Kenny, Das, Leeth, & Camp, 2018), insecure authentication (Das, Wang, Tingle, & Camp, 2019)), or behavioral (e.g., sharing passwords (Das, Dingman, & Camp, 2018); and compliance (Das, Dev, & Srinivasan, 2018) (Dev, Das, Rashidi, & Camp, 2019)). This panel proposal addresses a third category of sociotechnical vulnerabilities that can and sometimes do arise from non-inclusive design of security and privacy. In this panel, we will address users' needs and desires for privacy. The panel will engage in in-depth discussions about value-sensitive design while focusing on potentially vulnerable populations, such as older adults, teens, persons with disabilities, and others who are not typically emphasized in general security and privacy concerns. Human factors have a stake in and ability to facilitate improvements in these areas.
Fairness Criteria for Allocating Indivisible Chores: Connections and Efficiencies
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

We study several fairness notions in allocating indivisible chores (i.e., items with non-positive values) to agents who have additive and submodular cost functions. The fairness criteria we are concern with are envy-free up to any item (EFX), envy-free up to one item (EF1), maximin share (MMS), and pairwise maximin share (PMMS), which are proposed as relaxations of envy-freeness in the setting of additive cost functions. For allocations under each fairness criterion, we establish their approximation guarantee for other fairness criteria. Under the additive setting, our results show strong connections between these fairness criteria and, at the same time, reveal intrinsic differences between goods allocation and chores allocation. However, such strong relationships cannot be inherited by the submodular setting, under which PMMS and MMS are no longer relaxations of envy-freeness and, even worse, few non-trivial guarantees exist. We also investigate efficiency loss under these fairness constraints and establish their prices of fairness.